Tag: CNN

Alejandro Valverde has kicked off the 2018 season with an impressive series of wins. Meanwhile Vincenzo Nibali delighted the tifosi with his victory in Milan San Remo. It is pretty easy to tell these two riders apart in the pictures above, but could computer distinguish between them?

Following up on my earlier blogs about neural networks, I have been taking a look at the updated version of fast.ai’s course on deep learning. With the field advancing at a rapid pace, this provides a good way to staying up to date with the state of the art. For example, there are now a couple of cheaper alternatives to AWS for accessing high powered GPUs, offered by Paperspace and Crestle. The latest fast.ai libraries include many new tools that work extremely well in practice.

There’s a view that deep learning requires hours of training on high-powered supercomputers, using thousands (or millions) of labelled examples, in order to learn to perform computer vision tasks. However, newer architectures, such as ResNet, are able to run on much smaller data sets. In order to test this, I used an image downloader to grab photos of Nibali and Valverde and manually selected about 55 decent pictures of each one.

I divided the images into a training set with about 40 images of each rider, a validation set with 10 of each and a test set containing the rest. Nibali appears in a range of different coloured jerseys, though the Astana blue is often present. Valverde is mainly wearing the old dark blue Movistar kit with a green M. There were more close-up shots of Nibali’s face than Valverde.

I was able to fine-tune a pre-trained ResNet neural network to this task, using some of the techniques from the fast.ai tool box, each designed to improve generalisation. The first trick was to augment the training set by performing minor transformations of the images at random, such as taking a mirror image, shifting left or right and zooming in a bit. The second set of tricks varied the rate of learning as the algorithm iterated repeatedly through the training set. A final useful technique created a set of variants of each test image and took the average of the predictions. Everything ran at lightning speed on a Paperspace GPU. After a run time of just a few minutes, the ResNet was able to score 17 out of 20 on the following validation set.

The confusion matrix shows that the model correctly identified all the Nibali images, but it was wrong on three pictures of Valverde. The first incorrect image (below) shows Valverde in the red leader’s jersey of the Tour of Murcia, which is not dissimilar to Nibali’s new Bahrain Merida kit, though he was wearing red in two of his training images. In the second instance, the network was fooled by the change in colour of Moviestar’s kit, which had become rather similar to Astana’s light blue. The figure of 0.41 above the close-up image indicates that the model assigned only a 41% probability that the image was Valverde. It probably fell below the critical 50% level, in spite of the blue/green colours, because there were were far more close-up shots of Nibali than Valverde in the training set.

Incorrect images of Valverde

Overall of 17 out of 20 on the validation set is impressive. However, the network had access to the validation set during training, so this result is “in sample”. A proper “out of sample” evaluation of the model’s ability made use the following ten images, comprising the test set that was kept aside.

Amazingly, the model correctly identified 9 out of the 10 pictures it had not seen before. The only error was the Valverde selfie shown in the final image. In order to work better in practice, the training set would need to include more examples of the riders’ 2018 kit. A variant of the problem would be to identify the team rather than the rider. The same network can be trained for multiple classes rather than just two.

This experiment shows that it is pretty straightforward to run state of the art image recognition tools remotely on a GPU somewhere in the cloud and come up with pretty impressive results, even with a small data set.

My last blog showed the results of using a deep convolutional neural network to apply different artistic styles to a photograph of cyclist. This article looks at the trendy topic of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Specifically, I investigate the application of a Wasserstein GAN to generate thumbnail images of bicycles.

In the field of machine learning, a generative model is a model designed to produce examples from a particular target distribution. In statistics, the output might be samples from a Gaussian distribution, but we can extend the idea to create a model that produces examples of sonnets in the style of Shakespeare or pictures of cats… or bicycles.

The adversarial framework introduces an attractive idea from game theory: to create a competitive form of learning. While a generator learns from a corpus of real examples how to create realistic “fakes”, a discriminator (or critic) learns to distinguish been fakes and authentic examples. In fact, the generator is given the objective of trying to fool the discriminator. As the discriminator improves, the generator is driven to enhance the authenticity of its output. This creates a virtuous cycle.

When originally proposed in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks stimulated much interest, but it proved hard to make them work reliably in practice. One problem was “mode collapse”, where the generator becomes stuck, producing the same output all the time. However, this changed with the publication of a recent paper, explaining how earlier problems could be overcome by using a so-called Wasserstein loss function.

As an experiment, I downloaded a batch of images of bicycles from the Internet. After manually removing pictures with riders and close-ups of components, there were about 1,200 side views of road bikes (mostly with handlebars to the right, so you can see the chainset). After a few experiments, I reduced the dataset to the 862 images, by automatically selecting bikes against a white background.

Sample of real bike images

As a participant of part 2 of the excellent fast.ai deep learning course, I made use of WGAN code that runs using Pytorch. I loaded the bike images at thumbnail size of 64×64 (training with larger images exceeded the memory constraints of the p2.large GPU I’m running on AWS). It was initially disappointing to experience the mode collapse problem, especially because the authors of the WGAN paper claimed never to have encountered it. However, speeding up the learning rate of the generator seemed to solve the problem.

Although each fake was created from a completely random starting point, the generator learned to produce images against a white background, with two circles joined by lines. After a couple of hundred iterations the WGAN began to generate some recognisably bicycle-like images. Notice the huge variety. Some of the best ones are shown at the top of this post.

Sample of images generated by WGAN

I tried to improve the WGAN’s images, using another deep learning tool: super resolution. This amazing technique is used to solve the seemingly impossible task of converting images from low resolution to high resolution. It is achieved by taking downgraded versions of a large dataset of high resolution images, then training a neural network to reproduce a high-res version from the corresponding low-res input. A super resolution network is able to learn about certain properties of the world, for example, it converts jagged curves into smooth ones – a feature I’d hoped might be useful for making wheels look rounder.

Example of a super resolution network on real photographs

Low res model input

Super res model output

Actual high res image

Unfortunately, my super resolution experiments did not lead to the improvement I’d hoped for. Two possible explanations are that a) the fake images were not low-res photos and b) the network had been trained on many types of images other than bicycles with white backgrounds.

Example of super resolution network on a fake bicycle image

Fake image input

Super res model output

In the end I was pretty happy with the best of the 64×64 images shown above. They are at least as good as something I could draw by hand. This is an impressive example of unsupervised learning. The trained network is able to use some learned notion of what a bicycle looks like in order to produce new images that possess similar properties. With more time and training, I’m sure the WGAN could be improved, perhaps to the point where the images might provide creative inspiration for new bike designs.